Selected Columns

Rika Kayama

As a psychiatrist, I have a certain amount of pride in my job. There are, however, times when I feel like calling it quits.

One of those times was just recently, as I received requests from magazines and newspapers to "analyze Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama."

The duty of a psychiatrist is to provide treatment to people suffering from illness or disorder. Is it not unethical to arrogantly declare, "This person has such-and-such a problem," even though the person himself does not want any diagnosis? On the other hand, with many people feeling doubt about the prime minister over his handling of the Futenma base issue, if psychiatric knowledge can help shed light on his actions, perhaps it is indeed necessary ... The prime minister is said to waver in his remarks, and I waver, too, in my feelings on analyzing him.

Requests to look at the prime minister from a "psychiatric standpoint" are nothing new. Since around the time of the wildly popular Koizumi administration, and the Abe administration which faced its end with the then prime minister's suddenly deteriorating health, its become a given that there will be phone calls asking, "If you were to diagnose the prime minister with something, what would it be?"

Of course, anyone and everyone has mental and emotional problems. There is no one with a "perfect" mental and emotional state. The famous Freud wrote that everyone is some extent "psychotic," and I agree with that.

That being said, for the mass media to always focus on this negative side of human nature and ask, "What's the illness this time?" with every new prime minister, it seems an odd thing to me.

When asked to provide an analysis of Prime Minister Hatoyama by the media, I replied, even while knowing that what I was saying was rude to the prime minister, that, "He seems kind and sincere, but as a result is unable to make difficult decisions or say 'no' when he doesn't have some kind of strong backing. I think he may have a tendency towards a dependency on others." His personality type can excel within boundaries set by others, but when told to go by its own feelings and decide freely, it does poorly. What the prime minister probably needed was solid support from his aides and council from advisors, but for whatever reason, the prime minister chose to go at things alone.

Actually, rather than helping to alleviate the doubts of the public, I think this kind of analysis might only cause people to further lose trust in the government. (By Rika Kayama, psychiatrist. This column was written at the end of May before Hatoyama announced his resignation as prime minister.)